O that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes! Then I shall not be put to shame, having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.
John 4:34
Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.’
Words of Grace For Today
Most humans have never thought to listen at all to God. Their loss, literally, as they plow through life, destroying more than they could imagine.
Most humans who have thought to listen to God, have learned just enough in such a way to make God’s Will into their own will, and they blithely continue on plowing through life, destroying more than they can imagine.
Those who strive to listen to God … well …
It’s really no different for us either: we continue to plow through life, destroying more than we can imagine.
So we, we who would live life in order to give life to others … so we pray constantly that we would be able to hear God’s will for us and follow God’s will with our thoughts, words, and deeds.
Yet without the Holy Spirit it is hopeless for us and our prayers.
Jesus was a different kind of person, one who knew and followed God’s will, not his own will made to appear to be God’s will. Rather Jesus knew, followed, and received nourishment by following.
Sometimes it is not hard to think that we are more like Hansel and Gretel trying to find the bread crumbs of Jesus, and receiving mere snippets of nourishment for the little treasures we find, sometimes most unexpectedly on what we thought was certainly not a path Jesus ever trod or sent us out on to tread one step at a time.
The most precious gift we receive from the Holy Spirit is to see, hear, and touch the presence of Jesus in our lives each day, in the most unexpected manners.
To see, we look …
To hear, we listen …
To touch, we reach out ….
Another day, this day, and we pray nourish us Jesus, with your bread of life and the gifts of the Holy Spirit most precious.
May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.
Words of Grace For Today
Valentine’s Day.
The day we celebrate love,
Sharing special times with our beloved.
…
And praying for those who use love as a cover for greed, avarice, and predatorily making their way through life, no matter the cost to others.
Love.
Love is a tremendous things.
Love is a terribly powerful thing that can defeat death and grief and hopelessness or
Love is a terribly powerful thing that abused can defeat life itself and all that is good in it.
The thing to note is that though a person who used love as a weapon against others certainly destroys many, many other lives, but first … first that person destroys their own life and everything that makes life worthwhile, which leaves them swinging at whatever they can hit to try to establish that they exist at all … which destroys even more of life in and around them.
Love, though embraced with awe and gentleness gives life to oneself and one’s beloved and so to all who witness this love, not least of all to the children who absorb into their lives that love is possible and life is good, and gratitude rather than greed is the key to life’s success and indeed to it is the key to life itself.
The Light of Christ Shows Us What Is in the Curves.
Psalm 71:8
My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all day long.
Matthew 12:34
You brood of vipers! How can you speak good things, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
Words of Grace For Today
What fills our hearts erupts inevitably from our mouths.
I know, the stomach empties its contents normally down the digestive track, but in rebellion it disgorges its contents up and out the mouth.
But when it comes to words, weeeell, our words inevitably (even for practised liars) reflect what is in our hearts, whether our hearts are consumed by greed, self-interests, destruction of others, and all sorts of evil OR our hearts bask regularly in God’s Word and as blessed saints become the embodiment of God’s Grace, unconditional love, and promises for all people.
Our words say it all. They speak less what we try to accomplish, and more what slavery we have bartered ourselves into with the Devil, or freedom we are gifted by God.
So we pray, Lord save us from the Devil and all the Devil’s wiles. Help us so that we can honestly and with gratitude say: My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all day long.
For then, all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well … and indeed all manner of things is already well, with us and with God’s creation.
Listen to me, you who know righteousness, you people who have my teaching in your hearts; do not fear the reproach of others, and do not be dismayed when they revile you.
1 Timothy 6:12
Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
Words of Grace For Today
To fight.
To fight usually involves things like fists, rifles, drones and bombs.
Or at least it usually involves scheming, manoeuvring, ruining the other, driving them out of here into exile, leaving them homeless and landless, or setting them up to die an early death.
To fight.
To fight the good fight of the faith to which we are called …
well that is an entirely different kind of fight.
It is a battle again evil.
It is a battle against evil first of all in ourselves, and then in those around us.
It is a battle that we can barely begin to fight … unless ….
Unless God brings us to be holy…
holy saints,
holy saints equipped to bring Grace to bear on condemnation, bold forgiveness to douse reproach and destorying, kindness to undo all violence, and truth to outshine all deceits.
This is the battle of the universe, of which God created us, for which God created us, not that we might die in the battle or bear the burden of the war, doch …
doch (rather) that we might be vessels carrying hearts transformed to know God’s presence with us, God’s righteousness permeating us, no matter what may come.
Shine, Jesus Shine.
Otherwise it is so dark in here!
Shine, with all the candle power the universe has ever known,
Shine in this darkness, and transform those who would destory and destroy us.
Shine, Jesus, Shine!
Sing, Children of God, Sing!
Let there be Light, and let there be jubilation, in every corner of creation, in every darkness of evil, and in every heart.
Therefore he shall give them up until the time when she who is in labour has brought forth; then the rest of his kindred shall return to the people of Israel.
Matthew 9:36
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
Words of Grace For Today
The great masses of humanity have always lived subjected to those with power and the ability to lord it over them. There’s never been a shortage of those lining up to take on the place of power and privilege and comfort … and lording it over others to have all that.
Jesus, God’s story of God’s amazing unconditional love for all people -especially the poor and the outcasts – sees the crowds gathered to hear the Good News that he preaches, the healing that he administers and he knows their plight.
God has walked with God’s people in poverty and oppression and persecution and exile without homes. God knows everything. God knows the plight of the great majority of humans who have ever lived. God knows the corruption of those who lord it over them. God has, seemingly, abandoned God’s people at many and various times to the clutches of those oppressing, persecuting, and driving masses into poverty. God has always walked, into those times of apparent abandonment, with God’s people. And God has walked God’s people out of those times as well.
God sends the Law, the Prophets, and the Good Shepherd to guide the people out of those times that are like hell. Today God continues to send God-made saints to walk with people in all circumstances, to help them reconnect with the promises of God and to live (even in poverty and oppression and persecution and exile without homes) abundantly. So it is when we live aware that God walks with us.
There is nothing in life that is more blessed, more secure, and more rich than God’s presence and God’s promises that we, too, shall once again walk among God’s people, no longer shunned and falsely accused, but exonerated and honoured.
And those who lord it over others, driving them to poverty, into oppression, into persecution and out into exile homeless … those who lord it over others and live in comfort will face God’s judgment. Whether they too will receive God’s Grace is not for us to say. It is God’s will, which will be done. For now the ‘lords’ breathe only as a gift from God, giving them time for the amendment of life.
For the rest of us, God has compassion and demonstrates it day after day, in the simplest and most profound ways.
Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.
Galatians 4:6-7
Because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.
Words of Grace For Today
Promises.
Promises provide for a future.
Promises from God provide for a blessed future … and happiness.
God chooses us and we become children, heirs of a kingdom like no other. We are chosen, made holy and sent out into the world with the inheritance that all envy and few would if they understood it fully.
The inheritance we receive is to be servants. To serve God. To serve God’s creation and all of God’s creatures, all people.
No great glory in that. It is ascending to … well ascending to the lowest among the lowest on earth.
That is the heritage that the children of God inherit.
Welcome to the children of God, promised great blessings, and sent out to share the Good News that transforms lives and all creation … but
it does not give us power, wealth, renown, comfort, security, or … well almost anything else that we humans would list as what we desire to have in life … except we are guaranteed God’s unconditional love and the huge challenge of sharing it with everyone, even those who least deserve it (especially them.)
Promises.
Promises provide for a future.
Promises from God provide for a blessed future … and happiness.
Save us, O God of our salvation, and gather and rescue us from among the nations, that we may give thanks to your holy name, and glory in your praise.
John 17:11
And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.
Words of Grace For Today
We pray in many and various ways: God, come and save us and protect us. Give us a place in your glory so that we may, as a strong and feared people among the nations and among our enemies, sing your praises and give glory to your name.
The church has prayed this and sought this and achieved this in many and various ways. As a strong institution among it’s enemies, and among the nations, it has played the part of a element of life to be feared … by individuals who the church could ruin by exorcising them (making killing them legal!) or today simply by ostracizing them without due process (so that they are denounced by many based on false rumours and false charges, usually that the person is ‘mentally unstable.’ Sounds like what was done to the prophets of old!) … and by organizations and nations who the church has stripped of all power simply by denouncing them though today it takes a bit more than that so the denouncing is done by political leaders who serve the will of the church.
What we, as individuals and as a church, have failed to do is to remain humble, vulnerable, meek, servants of God, living out God’s unconditional love for all people, and loving all people with a sacrificial love that may cost us everything as it opens the possibility of life abundant to all people.
It is not surprising that the church has become less and less attractive to people struggling in a more and more secular world. That is: the church is less and less capable of engendering fear or deserving respect across huge swaths of society, and even faithful followers of Christ in ever greater numbers are disillusioned with the corruption and blatant hypocrisy of leaders and followers alike that is rampant inside the church.
In many and various efforts to regain it’s fast dwindling numbers the church has tried and still tries to reach the expressed needs of the people, serving as a secular social club (with no real Word of God permeating anything about the club) or serving up ‘fear of others’ as a basis for a made-up faith/religion or passing off a fervent self-serving piety as the basis of faith … all which garner great responses … sometimes.
Still the numbers of members and churches plummets as it has for decades.
So the books written and the ‘new’ ideas of how to make the church a success … at least number-wise.
All of it is empty of course, because it tries to gain God’s glory by plan and scheme and effort. There is no human effort that can gain God’s favour, or gifts, or blessings.
That’s God’s choice and doing.
We have so long ignored it that we simply do not understand: Our purpose is not to succeed, but to fail, and in failing God makes plain the Grace that sustains us and all the world.
Yet we pray, as a church and as individuals: God, save and protect us. Help us to be the greatest of your disciples so that we can sing your praise and give you the glory in all things. But what we mean is God save us and protect us from failure so that we can exercise our own power in this world over others, live comfortable lives, and plan for a good future (of power and influence) for our children and grandchildren and many generations to come.
What God answers is: No.
God is our salvation, but not so that we can ‘Lord it over others.’
God makes us one with the destitute, the starving, the outcasts, the ostracized, the imprisoned, the persecuted, and the failures of human history … so that we will finally better understand: it’s not at all about us and our successes or failures. It is all about sharing all that God has given us as free gifts.
So as the church declines into irrelevancy God’s Word lives as the most relevant word in a world inundated with words: God Loves us all unconditionally, and renews life for all people, and sends us (who hear the call and give thanks for the renewed life we have) to share God’s unconditional love and full life abundant with all people, especially the poor and our enemies.
There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.
John 15:16
You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.
Words of Grace For Today
All this reaching for …
… for viral posts,
… for glory,
… for fame,
… for wealth,
… for power,
… for … well for anything that will fill the emptiness in our being, an emptiness of being separated from God,
All of it is futile, and most of it fills us – not with what we want, but deceptive as it is instead we get filled right up with shtako, and it sucks the life right out of us as we reach ever more desperately.
Most futile of all are all the human efforts spent (wasted) reaching for God.
The games we create to try to convince ourselves that we have reached God: all the piety, all the restrictions on our lives, all the condemnations of others to make ourselves look good (in God’s eyes, as if!), all the hate for ourselves and others that builds and comes out as self-righteousness and bullying. All these games are so life-sucking that we are soon left as mere shells of the life that God created us to enjoy. And even then we reach and reach and reach for something, anything, to fill our overwhelming emptiness. All sorts of addictions follow: to alcohol (God’s gift so abused), to drugs (ingenuity of humans so perverted), to gambling (the gift of the necessities of life severely abused), sex (the gift of intimacy perverted by and into base self-indulgence and licentious promiscuity), work (the gift of labour perverted into an obsession that denies everything good in life), and on and on and on the addictions are numbered, not least of all the addiction to religiosity and piety (perverted from worshipping God, to worshipping one’s own efforts).
God’s gift to us of faith is exactly like the gift of life: only God can give it, we cannot reproduce it, nor even can we meet God part way to receive it. But oh, have we figured out ways to pervert, subvert, and deny it as God’s gift to us!
If God chooses to hide God’s presence from us then our prayers should well begin with Isaiah’s words, “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.” To which we should add: “SAVE US!”
So God is not.
As baptized saints we trust that Jesus came to demonstrate that we may often think God has abandoned us, Doch, God never does. God walks with us. God’s presence is not our choosing or in response to our doing or not doing, believing or not believing. God chooses us, to create us, to sustain us, to forgive us, to renew us, to make us saints able to be God’s Grace on earth.
As Jesus says, “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.”
This day, what fruit, what Grace, has Jesus led us to harvest from God’s great abundance, so that we have much to share with all around, especially the poor?
Those who mock the poor insult their Maker; those who are glad at calamity will not go unpunished.
Matthew 5:7
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Words of Grace For Today
The forecast is for -30⁰ tonight, dropping there by sunrise or an hour after.
Now, at 17:30, after the golden sun spread its butter across the trees, snow, and ice, as the sun has set only an hour ago, the thermometer sits squarely pointing at -30⁰, meaning it will get significantly colder before the ‘warming’ (or shall we say more accurately ‘the freeking-cold-mitigating’) rays of the sun start the thermometer’s climb to levels where humans can survive and machines run and breath does not freeze before it’s in one’s lungs or constantly in one’s own face.
Cold, and the challenges it presses on those living in these climes, is nothing to mock or to celebrate when others suffer it .. but you, of course, you are so privileged because you do not have to (or get to) suffer the cold.
Those who are poor, (and I fit rather securely in that category not to emerge before my death, other than by some inexplicable miracle – thank you liars all and corrupt officials too many to count), know the cold better than those who can afford to find comfort even at the extreme ends of the climate … expanding lower and higher and more extreme in so many ways as those extremes are now with climate change. To us poor the cold is not a simple thing or a nuisance. It is life threatening, directly. Is there enough wood ready and available to keep the fire going hot enough to avoid freezing as I try to get at least some sleep? Is the grate from the street sewer warm enough to keep my sleep tonight to be not just fitful, but also not the last sleep I get as I comfortably freeze and shake off this mortal coil? Are my blankets warm enough for another night of nightmares and cold sweats and nausea? Will I wake? And if I do will my body be as whole as it is now, or will a limb or extremity be frozen solid or frostbit beyond salvation?
These considerations may be the focus of many people’s mockery: what did you poor thing do to earn poverty, for surely you deserve it, yes? Are you not smart enough to do better? If you had only worked harder when you were younger and able OR if you would have played along with the corrupt leaders, thugs and bullies, corrupt bishops and lay leaders included! Oh, you fool, for succumbing to addictions that will kill you sooner or later, so why should we be concerned if your death is a comfortable one today, costing us nothing in health care … rather than your death at a later date after huge costs to us all as you die from your addictions. It matters not, of course, that I and many other poor people have no addictions or perversions. Instead what informs the corrupt on lookers are the rumours and false stories about us, which are told to protect the hugely guilty people who have cheated us of finances and years of good life. Then of course, many others are driven to addictions to escape the cruelty of people in their lives, or to mental instability, or to plain outright madness, by the inexplicable cruelty of bullies, weak bullies, destructive bullies, pitiful bullies.
To us poor people be God’s mercy shown, should we be so blessed. As for me and so many others baptized as saints, we have discovered God’s mercy for us and all others. Therefore we trust that God, if no others, will deal with us … and indeed does deal with us … each day of our lives with mercy, love, forgiveness, and favour.
What’s your night look like, for the coming night of cold? Is it your heart that is cold? Or just the climate outside? Have you learned to respond to others, especially us poor, with mercy, and love, and
He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
2 Corinthians 5:21
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Words of Grace For Today
We can of course try really hard to make things right, for ourselves, and for others if we are so inclined to care, though I’ve met some people as I’m sure you have, who do not want to make it right for others at all, not at all. They make it as bad for others as they can, with lies, corruption, and false convictions.
Our efforts to make it right are simply not enough, not ever. We cannot make it right, not right enough, no matter how hard we try. God help us,
literally, for there simply is no other way to make it right, not right enough.
Jesus, though, has already made it right, very right, more than right, for Jesus makes everything right for us with God, and then …
then everything is right for us.
And those people who want to do us as much destruction as possible are kept far enough away that we are safe, as safe as ever, as safe as ever.
For our sake God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
So we are healed and made whole, for yet another day, another way, another life given to us again, though we certainly do not deserve it. So it is by Grace another gift of life, love and hope …
